Wednesday, 26 August 2015

No, we’re not talking about the
sort of package reminiscent of Hamilton v
Al Fayed but the distinctive – if that can be the right word – presentation
from the Compensation Recovery Unit (CRU)
of the Department for Work and Pensions
(DWP) in Tyne and Wear.

These visibly austere wrappers
are complemented by the quality of the confetti inside them. Who remembers Jeyes and Izal ??

Nothing wrong with that,
especially at a location where we’ll scan it on arrival and shred the
original. The country’s still broke, so
any reasonable economy is welcome.

It’s a pity that some cretin is
wasting the postage and the meagre effort to send it here when, along with a
couple of others earlier this week and many more in weeks past, they have
nothing to do with us.

Since the beginning of June 2015,
for reasons which are beyond me, this government department has been
supplementing the communications that properly relate to cases being handled by
my firm with a much larger number of notifications concerning people we’ve
never heard of. They started by sending
us fourteen in one post (all in separate envelopes of course) during the first
week of June.

Inspection revealed that these
were originally addressed to a firm of the same name in Christchurch,
Dorset. That’s about 54 miles from here
so close enough for us to know something about the place, far enough away to
obviate any confusion – or so you’d think.

Maybe we haven’t wasted enough of
our time looking but we can’t find any trace of a solicitor of this name in
Christchurch, past or present. There are
two separate firms in the North-East but the only outfit with a remotely
similar name in Christchurch apparently doesn’t deal with personal injury.

Of course, we’ve told the
CRU. We sent them back the first
fourteen letters, so it would be a visible problem. Has that achieved anything? No.

Somebody keeps pressing the
button. It’s curious, is it not, that
our references are always quoted as either “not provided” or the name of the
client we don’t act for.

One of our local courts has
recently come up with a variation on this type of puzzle. A couple of weeks ago we received a Notice of adjourned hearing that didn’t
identify either of the parties at all.
The document just has a big blank space top left.

And of course the one piece of
unique information, being the case number, was in an altered format unrecognised
by our case-management systems. Fortunately
it didn’t take too long to guess at possibilities and check document folders
for a close match.

We still don’t know what prompted
that particular notice of adjournment for more than two months (though we can
guess at the part that may have been played by the opposition) because we can’t
get any answer from the court.

One of the Cornwall courts has
also made a decent bid for some kind of prize this month. This is similar stuff we’ve experienced in
Devon in the past but it gets better...

At the end of May we were
notified by the CCMCC in Salford that one of our actions was being transferred because of
an application by one of three defendants to set aside judgment.

Knowing how long these things
take in the best of circumstances, we left it for two or three weeks before then
starting to chase. The terminally grumpy
letter went in the third week of July.

What we then exposed was the making
of an order, in the first week of July, setting aside one of the
judgments. There had been no hearing and
the order hadn’t been sent to us in the space of more than two weeks. There’s not much hope that we get onto
sophisticated stuff like notices of the right to apply to vary or set aside,
and a copy of the application which nobody had sent to us.

So this comes to the surface
along with another order, essentially repeating the set aside of the same
judgment, but with the appropriate statements (CPR 23.9) that because the order
has been made without a hearing we can apply to set it aside. That's accompanied (why?) by the order made a
fortnight earlier that ostensibly already set aside the judgment but which is
obviously defective and ineffective.

Neither has with it a copy of the application which prompted the
making of the order. We have to chase
for that.

During the course of the week
that follows, a copy of that application is faxed to us. We’re right up to the time limit for filing
the application to set aside within seven days so as a precaution we send by
email, and ask for the fee to be debited to our account with the MOJ.

Here’s where we run into the problem that the
Rules still haven’t caught up with electronic payments so that we can’t file
such an application because it’s one that attracts a fee – even though it’s no
longer one that requires a cheque.

Anyway, we fax it. When we telephone the court to check that the
application has been received and processed, we’re told that anything sent by
fax won’t have been received. The court
representative insisted that we couldn’t have sent anything by fax because the
machine has been turned off and not used for four years!

Confronted with the report that
we received a fax from them – on the
same number - the week before and also
that we’d received a delivery confirmation in response to our transmission, our
contact seemed…..well, confused.

Nearly four weeks later we’re
still awaiting notification of the date to challenge an order made without
notice or consultation on an application that was apparently filed in Salford
nearly three months ago. This is just
great for the commercial client who wanted to move swiftly on recovery of an
unpaid and historically undisputed five figure debt.

On a lighter, almost surreal,
note we come finally, for now, to this month’s bid from Lambeth – always a good
contender.

In one fairly recent example, we
telephoned this citadel of justice to chase issue of some proceedings to be told there was no trace of
them, even two or three weeks after they’d been posted, and that it was
currently taking somewhere in the region of sixty (yes, 60) days to issue.

There was a lot of nervous and bewildered
laughter this end when a notice of issue arrived in the post less than twenty-four
hours later clearly evidencing the fact that the case had been “in the system”
all the time.

Standing back for a moment, this
is the administrative world that we have to grapple with day in, day out. We’re still trying to deliver something that
resembles an efficient litigation service despite incompetence and delay from
almost every direction in which we turn.
Daily, we’re trying to manage our own frustration and that of our
clients.

Meanwhile, Mr Gove seems set to
continue Count Grayling’s job of sucking the life blood out of our court
service. Apparently, we are going to
close another 91 courts across the country and save what will, frankly, be
peanuts within the overall scheme of things.

It’s clear that they can’t cope
now so how can we possibly take away yet more resources. At the same time, the
Lord Chancellor has the nerve to suggest that we’re going to have yet more
increases in court fees, doubling that grotesque £10,000 figure to
£20,000. (See Road to ruin and linked posts)

For what?

How about recognizing that
actually we need more and better resource, more people, more training, more
motivation? Instead we get more cuts to achieve savings that are a fraction of what
we waste on stuff which is a great deal less important than the civil justice
system.

Perhaps we could console
ourselves with the thought that after a lot of screaming and shouting, things
often do happen eventually. Oh, that
reminds me – Lambeth...

They must have bucked the trend
there (perhaps because ordinary litigants have given up) or they have people
with special abilities because this morning we received a document – in a case
that we are dealing with – for named clients we do recognise – entitled “Notice
of Possession”. In the main body of the
document it tells us this:-

Interesting – worrying,
even. I’m left asking myself whether the
exorcism will be listed immediately afterwards or whether that might be released
to another priest, possibly in a different dimension.

Will anybody notice, even after
the death of what was once the paragon of justice?